'How golden was my valley'

We lived like one large family. Today, we may be scattered across the world. But we have still remained one family. Last night, Reba calls me “from the other side of the Brahmaputra” and talks as if we met just yesterday. Ralph exchanges greetings from Canada while brother Hugh keeps in touch with all his mother’s friends who are still alive. We chat about the Texeiras, Cresswells, Appajis and Suris as if they were all not dead many years ago.

Kolar Gold Fields is just a dilapidated memory for me now. Edgar’s Shaft in the Mysore Mine or the Bullen’s Shaft in Champion Reefs are silent. The little “cages” which hurtled miners down hundreds of feet to fetch the precious rocks that were crushed, sieved and plunged into boiling vats
of water from where the molten gold took shape, are silent sentinels of the past.

They could tell you stories of the men they carried to the bowels of the earth alive and brought back dead if they were trapped in a “rock burst.”

These men were the exploited victims of John Taylor and Sons, a mining company in far off England. Its white employees were the patricians who lived in palatial bungalows, whose children attended private schools, whose families enjoyed luxurious clubs which denied entrance to “Indians and dogs.”

KGF was our shame and disgrace as Gandhi remarked when he visited the gold fields during the Quit India movement.

Notwithstanding all this humiliation, it was my home. The place where I was born, schooled, played with friends and grew up. A place where I learnt the hardships of living in a mining town. Where you walked along the tram lines and surreptitiously collected small black rocks that glittered in the sun.

We were told not to pick up sand or stone in this land of gold. We could only watch from a distance the rocks being blasted to smithereens while the cyanide residue collected into hillocks that became home for wild animals.

I watched the long line of miners every morning as they trudged to the shafts to be hurtled down hundreds of feet in the quest for gold. Most days, they returned. But, when an accident occurred in the bowels of the earth, I still hear the wailing of mothers and wives.

I have saved one black piece of rock from this deepest mine in the world which dazzles when held up to the light. It is the only tangible reminder of a lost childhood. It lies undisturbed in a safety vault in the bank. One day, I hope to bury it in the earth where it belongs.